Based on your conduct you got merits or demerits. Over 5 demerits a day and you were marching in the sun for 45m per demerit. Talking back to a professor was 2 demerits. Cursing was 4. Fighting was 10-20 based on severity.

The other kicker was that they accumulated. Every 9 or 12 weeks they would tally your total demerits for the quarter and year and based on that you would be given a "conduct status" that determined rank advancement and privileges.

The people with the highest conduct (sub 15 demerits per 9 week period) could have an Xbox and a TV in their room, but no M Rated games. You also got to go into town on weekends. This meant you could smuggle contraband back to the barracks.

If you were there in middle school, and because the 15 demerit cutoff was higher than the punishment for fighting (usually 10 demerits), you could and would just get your ass beat if you hoarded Shin Ramen cups, Gatorades, Cigs, or other valuable materials (porn) ->they'd take it

The exception to this was the korean kids. They sort of rolled in a pack / gang and it was not smart to fuck w them bc they ran all the student logistics ops and would mess your life up if you did. You meals would go missing, you'd get worse gear, etc

And the presence of the clearinghouse allowed for gambling with settlement. Problem was they banned playing cards, etc. So what did we have we could gamble on? Not much. But we did have a Dance Dance Revolution set up.

My 8th grade year I am bunk mates with one of the aforementioned korean middle school gangsters. And the DDR set up becomes the default method of gambling and settling scores on which there is serious contraband.

Fast forward 3-4 months and the Bravo company barracks is probably the most competitive group of DDR players ever assembled, bc everyone played like 3 hours a night to try to rig some bet the next day.

Being military guys, they found the concept of underground dance fighting for contraband.... "entertaining", so rather than banning it or coming down, they put up cameras around the DDR set up and recorded everything.

They then did a little editing and put together a 10 minute superclip of the most horrible looking people dancing (if you were fat, lanky, or otherwise funny looking, they cut you in), and played it in front of the entire battalion.

Everyone involved got beat up and their shit got run through. I probably lost 20-30 Shin Ramen cups, which was a big hit to my tangible net worth at the time. All while my truly magnificent DDR skills were mocked.

It was seriously traumatic at the time (I got KTFOed), and then you'd go in to the commandant and try to explain and you couldn't get past the DDR stuff because... well, it was probably the funniest shit he'd ever heard/seen.

So now whenever I see DDR, I have a sort of Vietnam Flashback to getting my ass beat and get really weird about it. But, again, it's not really a story you can get through bc it's so absurd. On the bright side, I'm still a DDR legend, which as some point will pay off I'm sure.